Fifty or a hundred years from now, when people talk about Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Cello Concerto, someone is going to reply, “That’s the one with the bongos, right?”

There is actually a wealth of imagination and inventiveness in this new, 35-minute orchestral masterpiece, which Salonen introduced to Bay Area audiences on Friday, March 15, in a powerhouse concert with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and cellist Truls Mørk. The score teems with pictorial and theatrical strokes, passages of heart-stopping beauty and fearless virtuoso demands on the soloist.

But it’s the bongos, which come to the fore in the last of the concerto’s three movements to do a fierce and funky pas de deux with the solo cello, that seem likely to define this piece. Not because that’s the richest or the most musically complex part of the score — it’s not — but just because it’s so conceptually catchy. It’s the kind of thing that takes you by surprise, then seems so natural you can’t believe no one thought of it before.

The Cello Concerto was the centerpiece for the first of three concerts making up the orchestra’s weekend-long visit to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall, presented by Cal Performances. Saturday night’s program features music of Schoenberg and Bruckner, followed Sunday afternoon by the world premiere of the oratorio “Dreamers” by composer Jimmy López and librettist Nilo Cruz.

And if audiences filled the hall for a glimpse of the conductor and composer who is on tap to lead the San Francisco Symphony beginning in 2020, they got a hugely heartening inkling of what the Salonen era is going to mean for Bay Area music lovers.

They heard fluid, resourceful renditions of music by Sibelius — the watery tone poem “The Oceanides” to start, and an encore of the familiar “Valse triste” that ranged from almost inaudible pianissimos to full-throated, silky dance steps.

They heard Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra performed with a rare degree of boldness and focus, from an account of the slow opening that seemed lit from within to an explosive finale that discharged all the pent-up energy of the work in a single whirlwind of sound.

Cellist Truls Mørk Photo: Johs Boe

Most memorably, though, there was the Cello Concerto, which was written in 2016 for Yo-Yo Ma and marks a major addition to a compositional catalog already bursting with delightful creations both large and small. (A world premiere recording, featuring Ma and Salonen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has just been released on Sony Classical.)

Like so many of Salonen’s compositions, this one comes with a collection of metaphorical imagery that helps situate a listener in the moment but isn’t necessary — or even always germane — to the artistic experience.

Take, for instance, the spangly, far-flung orchestral textures that open the piece, out of which the soloist emerges with the scraps of a musical line that slowly coalesce into a melody. Sure, you can hear that as a creation myth, or a cosmological progression from chaos to order. But you can also simply marvel at the shapeliness and fervor of Salonen’s writing for the cello, qualities that came through beautifully in Mørk’s eloquent performance.

In the second movement, Salonen uses electronic looping, gently and sparingly, to build a kind of hyper-soliloquy in which the cello engages in dialogue with versions of itself, then goes further to argue the matter with an alto flute. Insistent bird cries, created by eerily sliding string harmonics, put in an appearance to set up a delicious final tour de force.

And just when the piece starts to feel as if it’s becoming too deeply set in its slow, deliberative ways, the finale arrives with a jolt of energy. The orchestra explodes into an exuberant shimmy, the soloist tears across the fingerboard in a terrifying display of technical brilliance, and the percussionist joins in as if to kick everything up one rhythmic notch.